The more modest materials of artistic practice occasionally come
under the purview of the artist and are elevated to the status of art.
In the 70s, when Rauschenberg was short on materials, having just moved
from New York to a small island near Florida, he looked around his
studio and saw the clutter of packing supplies and other detritus. He
took immediately to what was at hand, and the Cardboards, a series of works made from simple cardboard boxes, were born.

New York artist Ivin Ballen was also struck with a similar
revelation: while transporting several of his earlier works across
country, he looked in the back of his car and found the works, wrapped
in plastic and cardboard, transformed.

Ballen set about investigating this new vision, and while his
paintings are immediately reminiscent of those shocking Duchampian
works of Raschenberg, they are anything but ready-made. Ballen's
process involves building a maquette from humble materials, casting
them in fiberglass or resin, and painting them with trump l'oeil finish.

At first glance the effect is convincing, and without close scrutiny
the objects appear to resemble so much contemporary art (see:
Unmonumental at The New Museum) with their wacky assemblage
construction. Upon inspection the paintings reveal elements of their
process. "Tape" impresses rather than exudes, depths become
protrusions, and the whole is a negative of its model. This reversal is
characteristic of Ballen's work—here the ready-made is actually the
constructed—and more Étant Donnés than Fountain.

Ballen
has an loving relationship with the mimetic properties of his objects
but isn't content to merely copy the surfaces of his models. Grape Mine,
a vaguely H-shaped work, has a perspectival painting of two crossing L
beams on one of its barrel shaped protrusions. The image raises the
epistemic question of which representation is closer to reality: that
of the painted beams, or the sculptural elements that imitate the
objects from which they are cast.

Both are an illusion, of course, but Ballen deftly suspends his
paintings in the interplay between the reality of the object and its
image. These works may be anything but ready-made, but they represent
the ready-made by quotation. They function as a comment on the
tradition of appropriation; do we really perceive the object (a urinal)
or do we see the veneer (Fountain), which is art?

Further fluctuating this distinction, is the work Speakers (2-way).
This sound hybrid piece produces a sort of feed-back loop, which grabs
sounds from outside, themselves a sort of ready made, and projects them
into the gallery space to a transformative effect. The music alters the
environment of the gallery, which in turn alters the work.

The alteration that Ballen first saw, that of his art transformed by
packaging, is a reminder that what masks a thing may be more powerful
than what is beneath. 50/50 is a show that examines the porous
boundary between perception and artifice, producing a number of
fine distinctions along the way.

The more modest materials of artistic practice occasionally come
under the purview of the artist and are elevated to the status of art.
In the 70s, when Rauschenberg was short on materials, having just moved
from New York to a small island near Florida, he looked around his
studio and saw the clutter of packing supplies and other detritus. He
took immediately to what was at hand, and the Cardboards, a series of works made from simple cardboard boxes, were born.

New York artist Ivin Ballen was also struck with a similar
revelation: while transporting several of his earlier works across
country, he looked in the back of his car and found the works, wrapped
in plastic and cardboard, transformed.

Ballen set about investigating this new vision, and while his
paintings are immediately reminiscent of those shocking Duchampian
works of Raschenberg, they are anything but ready-made. Ballen's
process involves building a maquette from humble materials, casting
them in fiberglass or resin, and painting them with trump l'oeil finish.

At first glance the effect is convincing, and without close scrutiny
the objects appear to resemble so much contemporary art (see:
Unmonumental at The New Museum) with their wacky assemblage
construction. Upon inspection the paintings reveal elements of their
process. "Tape" impresses rather than exudes, depths become
protrusions, and the whole is a negative of its model. This reversal is
characteristic of Ballen's work—here the ready-made is actually the
constructed—and more Étant Donnés than Fountain.

Ballen
has an loving relationship with the mimetic properties of his objects
but isn't content to merely copy the surfaces of his models. Grape Mine,
a vaguely H-shaped work, has a perspectival painting of two crossing L
beams on one of its barrel shaped protrusions. The image raises the
epistemic question of which representation is closer to reality: that
of the painted beams, or the sculptural elements that imitate the
objects from which they are cast.

Both are an illusion, of course, but Ballen deftly suspends his
paintings in the interplay between the reality of the object and its
image. These works may be anything but ready-made, but they represent
the ready-made by quotation. They function as a comment on the
tradition of appropriation; do we really perceive the object (a urinal)
or do we see the veneer (Fountain), which is art?

Further fluctuating this distinction, is the work Speakers (2-way).
This sound hybrid piece produces a sort of feed-back loop, which grabs
sounds from outside, themselves a sort of ready made, and projects them
into the gallery space to a transformative effect. The music alters the
environment of the gallery, which in turn alters the work.

The alteration that Ballen first saw, that of his art transformed by
packaging, is a reminder that what masks a thing may be more powerful
than what is beneath. 50/50 is a show that examines the porous
boundary between perception and artifice, producing a number of
fine distinctions along the way.